Report Suggests Kids Born Today Will Spend 25% Of Their Lives Looking At Screens

How much time do you spend staring at a screen on a daily basis? Probably not as long as your kids will, if there’s anything to a new study released today, which found that kids in the United Kingdom will spend an average of 1/4 of their lives watching a screen of some sort. If that seems a little low to you — and it does to us — keep in mind that number isn’t counting hours spent at work, where watching videos of cats being cute or people hurting themselves or cute cats hurting people is most prevalent, meaning that the real hours spent watching a TV, computer or phone screen will register somewhere around “all of them.”

The new study, by U.K. insurance company Halifax, also found that 25% of folks cop to using their devices to check email, Facebook or Twitter from their bed, and about 10% do so while they’re in the bathroom. Again, while this is gross, the numbers still seem very low to us.

One stat did seem particularly on the high end to us, gadget junkies though we may be — that’s the 45% of Brits who use their electronic devices to communicate with someone who is inside the same house as they are. Seriously, folks? I thought the only people who did that were serial killers hiding from babysitters. Apparently, it’s a thing now, though, which proves that even if a loved one heard you laugh out loud at something they tweeted, the only way to really validate them is on Twitter. Otherwise, how would they even know what you’re laughing at. It could have been anything!